A little more than half were single, and among those with a spouse or a partner, 23% had children.

The average age of Life Works Here participants was 36, with ages ranging from 21 to 63. (The George Kaiser Family Foundation is also responsible for the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center, also located in Tulsa). Tulsa’s program taps the largesse of oil billionaire George Kaiser’s family foundation, which is the sole funder of Tulsa Remote. At present, Choose Topeka can only use its $300,000 annual slice of the the city-county sales tax revenues. Board of Education Historic Site.īut it’s also about funding. The Bob Dylan Center, a world-class museum devoted to the artist’s body of work that opened in May, will draw fans from across the globe to Tulsa for decades to come. Tulsa is also more of a cultural destination. It’s a much larger city, for one: about 400,000 people live there, compared to 125,000 in Topeka. Tulsa’s program has a leg up on Topeka’s for a variety of reasons. “Every two weeks we bring a new cohort in.” “Our goal for 2022 is 1,100,” Harlan said. In 2020, they added another 350 remote workers, then 950 in 2021. Tulsa Remote relocated nearly as many people to Tulsa in its first year - 60, in 2019 - as Choose Topeka has in three years. I think we’d prefer to bring in people from out of state, but we see what we’re doing as giving some Kansans new options, new opportunities.”

We physically do not have enough people to fill those jobs.

Shawnee County right now has 6,000 open jobs and only 1,000 people that are unemployed. “We don’t deny that we’re sometimes competing with other communities across Kansas,” Ross said. (Participants who work for a local company get up to $15,000.) More than a third of Choose Topeka’s participants migrated to the city from elsewhere in the state, data shows, suggesting its economic incentives contribute to a kind of Border War in miniature, where Topeka sucks up talent from small Kansas towns and neighboring counties nearly as often as it attracts a remote worker from Texas or California. So part of how we see these incentive dollars is for steering people to live in Topeka and Shawnee County over neighboring counties and markets, like Lawrence and Kansas City.” “One of the reasons we started this program is that 40% of the people who work in Shawnee County and make more than $50,000 a year live outside the county. “Kenyon was already looking to purchase in the region, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was going to buy in Shawnee County,” Ross said.

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